Life expectancy of a Flash drive being used for Swap/ReadyBoost?

[MasterNetra]

I was wondering if anyone had any idea what the life expectancy of a flash drive would be if it was used for readyboost/swap? I have both a 8GB and 4GB flash drive I was thinking of using the 4GB as a Swap drive to further my system's performance capabilities for like gaming and what not, laptop only has 1GB of ram and supposedly can't be upgraded further (although when I had windows on this machine I had some hardware info software that said it could support up to 2GB and claimed that the bio's info or whatever on it was wrong, but dunno) so yea could use the boost. I've had both USB drives for about 3 or so years already.

[disabledaccount]

It depends on quality of flash chip and current life-time write count.
Generally Flash drive is not dedicated for write-intensive applications and for long term data holding, because it don't have spare "sectors" (unlike HDD) and is not protected by wear-prevention algorithms (unlike SSD).

[MadCow108]

ssd's lasts years even if you write and read from them 24/7.

or are you talking about flash chips like their built in usb sticks? those probably last less long.

but making your swap faster will not gain you much, especially for gaming.
even on the best ssd io bandwidth and latency is several orders of magnitude slower than ram so your machine will still come to a grinding halt whenever you start swapping.

[gordintoronto]

Using a USB flash drive for swap will be much, much slower than using your hard drive.

[MasterNetra]

ssd's lasts years even if you write and read from them 24/7.

or are you talking about flash chips like their built in usb sticks? those probably last less long.

but making your swap faster will not gain you much, especially for gaming.
even on the best ssd io bandwidth and latency is several orders of magnitude slower than ram so your machine will still come to a grinding halt whenever you start swapping.

Using a USB flash drive for swap will be much, much slower than using your hard drive.

I see.

[JustinR]

If it's an expensive flash drive like these, they can usually go 1-3 million writes before they become read-only, and unwritable.

[kerry_s]

I used a flash drive as swap for a year, I still use that same drive no problem.

With 1gb I wouldn't even use swap, but that's just me.

[BeRoot ReBoot]

Using a USB flash drive for swap will be much, much slower than using your hard drive.

I think the OP's talking about SATA flash drives, or, as they're commonly referred to as, SSDs.

[MasterNetra]

I think the OP's talking about SATA flash drives, or, as they're commonly referred to as, SSDs.

No, I am referring to your typical USB Flash Drives...Unless those are considered Sata, if so then thats news to me. >.>

[BlacqWolf]

No, I am referring to your typical USB Flash Drives...Unless those are considered Sata, if so then thats news to me. >.>

SATA is a type of hardware interface/connector, commonly used for non-removable media like internal SSDs/HDDs. A USB flash drive... well, uses USB.